Apple says site is undergoing maintenance but offers no reason, whether system failure, security breach, or platform revision

InfoWorld|Jul 19, 2013

The Apple Dev Center is been down for more than 24 hours, according to severalreports; the Apple Developer Forums are also down. At this point, one can only speculate on the cause of the outage. Apple has said only that the Dev Center is "undergoing maintenance" but hasn't provided any details as to what is happening or how long the sites will be down.

The Developer Forums went down shortly after the Developer Center, according to TNW; when I attempted to log in at developer.apple.com/devforums/, I was presented with a page that simply said, "We'll be back soon."

With the Dev Center out, users and developers can't download the iOS 7 beta or Mac SDKs, nor can they provision new devices or update expired certificates. With the forums down, they can't get any pressing questions answered.

This isn't the first time Apple has experienced this type of unannounced outage; however, this one has lasted longer than any in recent memory. Apple's silence on the matter has fueled as sorts of speculation on the cause. Among the theories:

There's a major revision under way for current iOS and OS X beta cycle, such as new back-end services to support some of their features or developer testing

Apple has discovered that leaked WWDC videos came from the site, so the company is implementing security measures to block that path